First responders are organizations and personnel that provide law enforcement, safety and protection services to the public. The first responders include law enforcement officers such as police, sheriff, highway patrol, detectives, special law enforcement, federal bureau of investigation (FBI), drug enforcement administration (DEA), military personnel, border patrol, and others. First responders also include fire and safety personnel, for example, firefighters, emergency medical services personnel, Red Cross personnel, and other emergency workers.
When multiple agencies arrive on the scene of an incident, there is virtually no ability to locally communicate between the various agencies due to the lack of interoperability between the communication units used by the various agencies. While first responders may have devices which have dual mode of operations (e.g., walkie talkie and cellular), there are no mechanisms to manage and control these devices to achieve interoperability of the communications devices at the scene of the incident.
When groups of first responders need to communicate with each other at an incident site, manual procedures such as “runners” are used to relay information. In some cases, inter-agency communications may occur by relaying information through the respective dispatch centers. However, this is a very slow and inefficient way of communicating when multiple agencies from multiple jurisdictions are involved. Thus, some groups of first responders may elect to just perform their respective tasks and operate without any type of unified communication or operation.
However, the lack of inter-operable communications between on-scene agencies can result in ineffective coordination, often with tragic results. Further, the lack of communications capability may cause inadequate situational awareness among the first responder personnel and among various first responder teams because there is no way to know the location of the various first responders at the incident scene without constant monitoring of voice communications. Integral to the lack of situational awareness at an incident site is the lack of an accurate system for maintaining accountability of the first responders at an incident site.
The typical methods used to maintain accountability of first response personnel are manual methods, wherein some physical means is used for identifying whether a responder is present at the incident scene, and in some cases to identify where the responder is assigned during the emergency. Because these methods are manual, they do not provide a way to accurately account for all first responder personnel at an incident site, nor do they provide ways to track the actual location or movement of first responder personnel around the incident site as the emergency unfolds. Consequently, the incident command personnel do not have detailed information on the location of the first responders and can lose accountability of first responders.
The lack of adequate means for inter-operable communications between on-scene agencies at incident sites results in incident commanders and first responder personnel that lack the detailed information and situational awareness of the incident scene to effectively respond to an emergency. The cascading effect typically results in slower response times to emergencies and a much higher level of risk for the first responders and incident victims.